On city boulevards and rural lanes, whites and women are far more likely to receive written warnings instead of tickets when stopped for identical traffic offenses, according to a Boston Globe study of newly released state records.

ivil rights leaders yesterday hailed the state's action on racial profiling and called for sanctions against police departments showing evidence of bias.
On Tuesday, state Secretary of Public Safety Edward A. Flynn ruled that 249 police departments have shown racial disparities in traffic enforcement and must collect more information on every traffic stop for one year.
A coalition of civil rights groups held a news conference yesterday at the State House to urge more action. They called for training police officers to avoid racial profiling, and disciplining those who show bias; penalizing police departments that show evidence of racial profiling, perhaps by cutting off state grants; and requiring smaller police agencies, such as the campus police at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the MBTA, to collect the information as well.
The groups included the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Justice, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP, Project R.I.G.H.T., Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, Northeastern Diocese of Saint Francis of Assisi, Youth Opportunity Boston, and the advisory board of the Institute on Race and Justice.
Several of the advocates expressed frustration that police chiefs had spoken out against the state action and had criticized the Northeastern University study on which Flynn based his ruling. They pointed out that several of the police chiefs in larger jurisdictions, such as Lowell and Boston, welcomed the study and supported the plan to collect more data. As for the police chiefs, "you would think that they were the victims," said Lisa Thurau-Gray, special projects director for the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk Law School. "They are the ones with state power and weapons."